Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is created works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The benefits will be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is much better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and are generated a lot faster, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.